


Hacking Heaven

by burglebezzlement



Series: The Nice and Accurate Guide to Disrupting an Apocalypse [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Charlie Lives, Charlie-centric, Chuck Shurley is Not God, Explicit Language, Fix-It, Gen, Hacking, Heaven, Minor Charlie Bradbury/Pamela Barnes, Minor Drug Reference, Mythbusters (freeform), POV Ash, Science Experiments, Trauma Recovery, initial canon levels of character death which will be fixed by the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-01
Updated: 2016-06-01
Packaged: 2018-07-11 16:33:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7060510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burglebezzlement/pseuds/burglebezzlement
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charlie, Ash, and Pamela hanging out in Heaven, testing the rules and blowing shit up. And maybe hacking an angel to send Charlie back to Earth.</p><p>
  <em>Charlie is the first one of the Winchesters’ known associates to track Ash down before he can get to her.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hacking Heaven

**Author's Note:**

> This is a stand-alone story set before the events of Corpus Analysis, the previous story in this series.

“I bet I can hack an angel,” Ash says.

He’s hanging at his memory of the Roadhouse with Charlie and Pamela. They’re all at that point of Heaven-drunk where things start picking up, where the nasty bite you’d get back on Earth is hanging back on you, leaving you feeling full of possibility. Almost alive.

“Whatever,” Charlie says. She’s leaning back against Pamela. They’re back from one of their three-day jaunts into Pamela’s memories, which always leave them ravenous and ready to try to drink Ash under the table.

“I did it,” Ash says. “Once.”

Pamela laughs. “Yeah, maybe. You don’t know.”

Charlie pulls on her Frappuccino bottle. She brings the Frappuccinos with her, from one of her memories. Ash wouldn’t be caught dead (deader?) with a Frappuccino in one of his memories.

Charlie does let Ash spike it with whiskey, which would be a waste of good whiskey if they weren’t in Heaven.

“Fine,” she says. “Tell me this tale.”

“There’s no story,” Pamela says. “He didn’t really do it.”

“I did.” Ash leans back on the pool table. Pamela raises an eyebrow like she’s going to fight him on it, but she doesn’t.

“So,” he says, finally. “You remember, like, five years ago. Maybe. I’m hazy on the time down there.”

“Mullet-head is talking about the original-flavor Apocalypse,” Pamela says. Her eyes go inside for a bit. “Carver Edlund. You remember him.”

“Chuck the Prophet.” Charlie nods. “Yeah.”

“Yeah!” Ash punches a fist into the air. “Yeah. I saved Chuck the Prophet.”

Charlie sits up. Looks at him sideways. “You didn’t.”

“I did,” Ash insists.

Charlie shakes her head. “Cas said he was dead, because Kevin wouldn’t have been called as a Prophet if he wasn’t.”

“He’s not dead,” Ash says, now. “He never died. I just… pulled a few strings.”

“Pulled a few strings.” Charlie takes another sip of her Frappuccino-whiskey. The level in the bottle’s staying the same. “Yeah, right.”

Ash waves his hand at his main computer. “Look at my Enochian translations and tell me I’m full of crap.”

Charlie looks over at his monitor, and then back towards Ash. “You’re full of crap.”

“Yeah, but not about this,” Ash insists. “I put an instruction in. After Sam and Dean left that one time. I put an instruction in the system, told a minor angel to pick him up and pull him out of the Prophet game. Let him go. Like… catch and release.”

Charlie lets her head fall back on Pamela’s shoulder. “So wait, how do you know it worked? Because I’m pretty sure Sam and Dean didn’t hear from Chuck again.”

Pamela laughs, low and throaty. “He doesn’t know it worked.”

“I do know,” Ash insists. “Some things you have to take on faith.”

* * *

A perfect Heaven, for Ash, would be learning new things and drinking and kicking ass.

This Heaven can provide two of the three. This Heaven wants him to relax into his memories like he’s taking a warm bath, let them wash over him. Let them wash him away. 

Ash has visited the Heavens of only a few people from before the 1800s, and most of those scare the shit out of him. They’re running together. Not in a good way. Like the people in them are forgetting anything past the memories. Like they’re turning into ghosts of themselves, basking in the highlights reel, over and over again. 

Fuck that shit. Ash is figuring out everything he can to learn and grow and keep moving, even up here, where it can take three weeks of research to find a particular person and the sigil for their own Heaven (and even then he still gets it wrong sometimes).

He keeps track of Sam and Dean’s known associates. First, it’s generally pretty easy to find them right when they arrive — the angels love to chatter about those two whenever one of their friends makes it upstairs. (Frank was an exception. Frank takes Heaven’s security seriously. Booted Ash when he tried to stop by, welcome him to the neighborhood.)

And he tracks Sam and Dean, whenever they bounce upstairs for a bit of R&R. So far they’ve only remembered that one trip, back before they stopped an apocalypse, but it’s always good to see them. (Mostly good. Ash still hasn’t found Mary and John, and although he hasn’t confided these suspicions to Sam and Dean at any point, he’s starting to wonder if they made it upstairs. Or maybe there’s another level or two up there above Ash. He once met an LDS believer, a woman who shared a name with someone else Ash was looking for, who told him that they were only in the Telestial Kingdom, and she’d missed out on Celestial or Terrestrial Kingdoms. And you know, Ash has heard weirder theories. Hell, he’s lived them.)

Ash isn’t the first inmate of the asylum to figure out the banishing sigils and movement sigils and some of the other tricks. You put a hundred billion monkeys in a zoo, some of them are going to start picking at the locks. But Ash has gone further than most. Maybe further than anybody.

So the thing with Chuck. Yeah. 

Ash knows what it’s like to get wrapped up in something you don’t understand or want. So when Heaven’s plan for Chuck came in on Ash’s Angel Police Band Radio, he decided to see what he could do.

See if maybe Chuck could hang out downstairs a little longer.

Ash is pretty sure it worked.

* * *

Charlie is the first one of the Winchesters’ _known associates_ to track Ash down before he can get to her.

She pops into his memory of the Roadhouse while he’s sleeping off a bender. Not that Heaven-booze leaves you hungover — but the memory of a long, relaxing sleep on his pool table is one of Ash’s favorites, and your brain can’t run at full tilt forever, even up in Heaven, where 24/7 ceases to have any meaning. Ash tries for a balanced diet of drinking, sleeping, fighting, and hacking the crap out of things. 

When Ash opens his eyes, there’s a woman with red hair, standing there, watching him.

“Shit!” He sits up. “Who are you?”

“Charlie,” she says. She looks over at his computer. “Sorry, I’m still figuring out some of this.”

“Yeah?” Ash rubs his hands over his eyes — not that it does anything, now, but old habits and all. “Wait, shit, you’re Charlie Bradbury. Right. I heard you bounced up but I hadn’t tracked you down yet.”

“Yeah,” Charlie says. “I read about you.” 

“What?”

“Carver Edlund,” Charlie says. “The books about Sam and Dean.”

“Yeah?” Ash heads for one of the bar fridges and cracks open a PBR. “Didn’t get to read those.”

“I have a memory that might have them,” Charlie says. “If you’re interested. If I can even take stuff from one memory to someone else’s — can you do that?”

They end up sitting at one of the tables and shooting the shit about the rules. Charlie has the advantage of popping up prepared, or at least more prepared than some people. She’s already figured out the basics of travel. She doesn’t have Angel Radio or any of the really good stuff, but she managed to track down her Mom’s heaven, which is pretty impressive for such a n00b.

“It was weird, though,” Charlie says, gazing off into the bar mirror. “I was there — I mean, the younger version of me? My mom was glad to meet real-me and everything — I mean apart from me being dead. She wasn’t happy about that. But she definitely didn’t recognize me at first. She’s been reliving the past with the kid version of me for so long.”

“Yeah,” Ash says. Some people take it like that. Get to Heaven and lose themselves in their past memories.

Actually, if Ash is being honest, most people take it like that. It’s one of the reasons he spends so much time tracking down Sam and Dean’s friends. It’s a subset of people pre-selected for wanting to kick Heaven’s ass.

* * *

Charlie brings the memory of Amazon Prime with her. Suddenly Ash’s universe of available computer equipment expands from the computer he had at the Roadhouse when it burnt plus what he can get from his memory of a happy afternoon at Radio Shack in 1987 to — everything Charlie can imagine finding on the internet, delivered to the memory of her favorite apartment 24 hours later.

It is the _best thing ever_.

Ash takes Charlie around with him on one of his regular rounds — introduces her to Ellen and Jo, Bobby and Rufus, all the usual suspects. They try to visit Frank again but he’s stepped up his security.

Pamela’s the one Charlie really hits it off with, though. Ten minutes after their first drink at Ash’s memory of the Roadhouse, Pamela’s inviting Charlie back to her heaven and Charlie’s taking her up on it. 

Ash doesn’t see Charlie for another — five days? Hard to tell in Heaven. 

Charlie bounces around. Visit to her mother, visit to Ash, day or two in her own Heaven to pick up an Amazon order and then it’s back to hang with Pamela, who’s threatened to get some advice from Frank if Ash tries to interrupt them. (Like Frank would talk to Pamela. Or even let her in.)

* * *

Hanging with Charlie makes Ash realize how much he’s missed down on Earth.

Sam and Dean — when they bounce upstairs, it’s always time-limited. They always have a list of questions (usually the same ones, and shit, Ash is getting tired of explaining that no, he still hasn’t found Mary and John Winchester). Then they give Ash the summary of what’s going on on Earth, maybe listen to a little angel radio. Most times they barely have time for a full beer before they’re getting pulled back down.

Charlie, though. She’s around long enough to call Ash’s PBR a hipster beer, which — what does that even mean? When they spend what Ash’s computer calls several days trying to hack together an intra-Heaven communication device, she calls it a hackathon. Her laptop is tiny and silver and the memory of her Netflix account lets her stream anything she can think of. 

Her heavenly streaming privileges include Mythbusters, which Ash never watched while he was alive because the Roadhouse wasn’t in the type of neighborhood that got fancy shit like basic cable, and he never bothered to torrent anything because he was always busy with something more interesting. But Charlie likes it, and Pamela tolerates it, and Ash is always in for blowing shit up.

Mythbusters leads to more discussions about how all the Heaven shit works, which leads to the sleep experiment — Charlie and Ash staying awake for what his computer’s clock times as five straight days. (Pamela gets bored after Hour 47 and heads back to the Meadowlands.) 

Charlie lays out a set of challenges that they hit every three hours, but even before Pamela leaves, it’s clear none of their reaction times are slowing down. 

They spent most of the non-test time playing pool. Charlie’s pool game is getting better. She’s finally moved past focusing on the basic physics shit that holds everyone back, started thinking strategically, one or two moves ahead, leaving the cue ball someplace that Ash can’t rescue it from. (Heaven means Ash can nap on the pool table and the felt will still be precisely as crappy as it was in his memory of the Roadhouse, which means crappy but playable.)

After five days, they agree that the data has ceased to be interesting. They could go for another five days, but why bother? If not sleeping them affected them the way it did on Earth, they’d have been hallucinating at that point. They both agree that sleeping is needed as a reset, a way of breaking Heaven into days, but not for any sort of biological or performance reason. 

Charlie disappears into Pamela’s Heaven for a few days, and Ash takes a well-deserved nap on the pool table and then gets up to practice his bank shots. Can’t let Charlie get ahead of him. 

The next test is what Charlie calls object permanence and Ash calls _why the fuck can’t I find that book from Bobby’s_ — taking objects from another Heaven and seeing how long they hang around for. Answer: Varied. No clear rules. It’s another challenge won by narrative logic instead of science, and it pisses Ash off.

* * *

Pamela’s on her back on the carpet in Charlie’s favorite apartment. She’s taken something interesting from someone in the Meadowlands and she’s waiting for it to kick in. “But did I need it?” she asks. “Do I like. Is there something in my blood right now? Do I even have blood?”

“We have blood if we remember having blood,” Charlie says. Which leads to a discussion of how you could find phlebotomy equipment and a medical lab in Heaven, and whether the results would even be reliable. How do you interpret blood samples from Heaven?

And then Charlie’s talking about sufficiently advanced simulations, whether it’d be possible to model a world down to the level where even your bloodstream and your DNA are modeled.

Ash takes another pull of his beer. “Like. The Matrix.” 

“Yeah.” They stare out the window for a while, watching Charlie’s memories of planes coming in to land at Midway. Heaven philosophy for geeks: it always ends in the Matrix.

“I don’t think that’s it, though,” Charlie says. “I don’t think that’s how any of this works.”

Ash just stares. 

“It’s narrative logic,” Charlie says, and it’s not the first time she’s made this point. “Like. You expect your computer to stick around, so it does. Even when you add the stuff from Amazon.” She waves her hand over at the bobblehead Hermione Granger on her desk. “But if I leave H in your Heaven — you’re not expecting her there, so she disappears. And she never disappears from my Heaven, because I expect her here. Even if she’s in your Heaven at the same time.”

* * *

The next question is time, because Charlie finally thought to ask why none of them ever get jet lag.

They talk Pamela into participating in this one. Charlie orders three identical wrist-watches from her memory of Amazon Prime, and they each strap them on and agree to spend what feels like three days in their own individual Heavens.

Charlie bounces back into Ash’s Heaven when her watch hits three days, which is actually three days, ten hours in Ash’s Heaven because he got sucked into a nap. (And, interesting: Naps take up time in Heaven. Not an expected outcome.) Pamela, meanwhile, had to be dragged out of the Meadowlands a day later (or at least a day later as measured by Charlie’s watch). At which point Pamela’s watch said two days, eighteen hours.

“Narrative logic,” Charlie says, again. They’re back in her Heaven, watching an enormous thunderstorm roll over the city towards Lake Michigan from the memory of her apartment. Outside, the sky is black, with purple flashes of lightning, and Ash can see whitecaps on the lake.

Inside, it’s silent. Either Charlie’s apartment had excellent soundproofing, or Charlie remembers that it did.

Pamela’s draped back over the couch, half-asleep. Charlie’s sitting beside her on the floor, back to the couch, one of her hands in Pamela’s. 

Ash is drinking — shit, he’s drinking Diet Coke. Charlie’s apartment runs to Frappuccinos, Diet Coke, and weird alcohol, like mead, because what the fuck, Charlie, how are you buying alcohol, White Russian Roulette?

He could run back to his Heaven for PBR but he’s feeling too comfortable now, watching the storm, and anyway if he leaves Charlie and Pamela might decide to speed time up, if you get his meaning, and then the storm will be over before gets back.

So. Diet Coke and lightning.

“Narrative logic,” Ash grumbles, now.

“Yeah.” Charlie lets go of Pamela’s hand and pulls something out of what she calls her shoulder-bag-of-holding, which she’s taken to carrying everywhere with her. “You want to see the next experiment?”

Ash leans forward, and Charlie explains: Cortisol test strips.

“I got the idea from Mythbusters,” she says, “and they’re available on Amazon Prime… or I thought they would be. Whatever. They arrived!” She tosses the box over for Ash to examine and leans her head back against Pamela’s shoulder, looking back over the lake.

There’s a strike of lightning close to her building, and finally, they can hear the thunder.

* * *

They spend the next few days looking for high and low-stress situations. Ash’s bar fight. Charlie’s hour spent playing with kittens. A roller coaster. The first time Charlie killed a vampire on her own — her very first solo hunt. An afternoon at the beach with Ash’s memories of Ellen and Jo (the real Ellen and Jo had other plans).

Nothing changes. No matter what they’ve done, no matter what they might feel their heart is doing — the cortisol strips stay the same.

“But we can’t draw any clear conclusions,” Charlie says, once they’ve thanked Bobby and Rufus for the hunt and gone back to play pool. Pamela’s over in her own Heaven — she left after the roller coaster.

Ash takes a pull of his PBR and studies the table. Charlie’s getting better; she missed her shot, but she stranded him behind one of her stripes. “How so?”

“Well, possible hypothesis one: Cortisol strips don’t work in Heaven because we don’t have physical bodies. Possible hypothesis two: These aren’t cortisol strips. They’re just something that looks like I expect a cortisol strip to look.”

After some study, Ash manages to make a bank shot and get one of his balls to drop. “Or possible hypothesis three, Heaven’s not something we were meant to study.”

Charlie makes a face. “More narrative logic.”

“Yeah.” Ash looks up from lining up his next shot. “You don’t like narrative logic, do you.”

“I spent a few years — “ Charlie picks up her Frappuccino and takes a sip. “Yeah, I don’t like it.”

* * *

There are parts of Charlie’s past that she doesn’t talk about.

There are sections of Charlie’s Heaven that she doesn’t bring Ash or Pamela into. Ash isn’t even sure if she goes in there herself.

* * *

_HYPOTHESIS: Pamela is psychic in Heaven._

_RESULTS: Confirmed._

_NOTES: Test subject was able to successfully guess all Rhine cards displayed to a non-confederate, randomly-chosen participant for the first half of the experiment. Testing was discontinued when test subject threatened to shove the cards up experimenter’s nose if she didn’t keep wasting her time on that bullshit._

* * *

Charlie’s staring out at the rain beyond the windows of the memory of her favorite apartment.

This time Ash remembered to bring the PBR. Pamela’s sprawled out across the couch, her head pillowed on a stuffed animal Ash doesn’t recognize. 

“Even the Mythbusters ran out of experiments,” Pamela says, which has to be in response to something she pulled out of Charlie’s head, because Charlie didn’t say anything.

“Yeah, well.” Charlie flops down at the end of the couch and puts Pamela’s feet in her lap. “They pivoted. To TV shows and movies and blowing random shit up.”

The three of them watch the rain as it fuzzes out the city’s towers behind the window.

* * *

Ash jumps into Charlie’s Heaven a few days later and finds himself somewhere she’s never brought him before.

Charlie’s sitting on a couch, wearing a red dress and a white pinafore with red embroidery. All around her, the memories of her family are celebrating Christmas — mother, father, grandparents. There’s a tree, covered in ornaments, and there’s a present on the floor that’s unwrapping itself.

“Hey!” Ash says.

Charlie looks up from the couch. “Oh. Hey, Ash.”

She does not look like someone reliving the best Christmas ever. 

Ash sits down next to her on the couch. “What’s going on?”

“I just — ” She stares off at the tree. “I wanted to relive something happy.”

“You look like your dog just died.”

“Yeah, well.”

Ash snags a mug of eggnog from the coffee table. It’s not alcoholic, which means it is a disappointment to the name of eggnog.

As they watch, the memory of Charlie’s mom takes out another present, this one strangely shaped, and hands it to the place where Charlie’s meant to be in this memory.

“It’s a Skip-it,” Charlie says. “I remember that thing. I kept tripping over it and then it broke.”

Ash doesn’t know what a Skip-it is, but he does know when someone’s avoiding the question. “So why are you here?”

Charlie doesn’t say anything, but she starts crying — giant tears streaking down her pale face and landing on her ridiculous Christmas dress.  “Hey,” Ash says. He puts an arm around her and pulls her head onto his shoulder. “Hey. It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay,” Charlie says, only it comes out more like _snot okay_ which is appropriate because she’s probably snotting up Ash’s vest. But Heaven means never having to do your laundry, unless maybe you liked doing laundry, only nobody Ash has met in Heaven ever has.

Ash doesn’t argue, just lets her cry on his shoulder. In the other part of the room, her family gathers in front of the tree for a family portrait. 

Eventually Charlie looks up. “I’m not supposed to be here, Ash.”

“Yeah,” Ash says. “Yeah, I don’t think you’re meant to be dead either.” Because he’s met a lot of people, in a lot of Heavens, and Charlie’s one of the ones who’s not relaxing into her memories. She’s one of the fighters. One of the ones who still had things to do down on Earth.

“That’s not what I meant.” Charlie’s keeping her head on his shoulder, like maybe she doesn’t want to meet his eyes. “Ash… I did some stuff.”

“Stuff.”

“On Earth. Well, mostly in Oz, but — yeah.”

Ash is at a loss, because the worst thing he can imagine the Charlie he knows doing is hacking (which, let’s be honest, Ash hardly feels qualifies as _bad_ — you want to keep your system secure, that’s on you).

He falls back on the basics Ellen beat into him, back when Jo was growing up. “Do you — do you want to talk about it?”

“It’s all going to sound… like… ridiculous.”

“You watched attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion?”

“Wrong genre.” Charlie takes a deep breath. “But yeah. Basically.”

Charlie’s family gathers around for cookies and hot chocolate while the real Charlie tells Ash about the Emerald City. About Dorothy, and the Wizard, and the war. About a magic spell that means all the hard choices are taken away from you, a spell that splits you until some part of you can be exactly as ruthless as required.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Charlie says now. “If I had known the kinds of things Dark Charlie was going to do, Ash, I swear — the price was too high.”

Ash brushes her hair back from her forehead. “I know.”

“You don’t know, I haven’t even told you!”

“You’re a good person.”

“I’m only half a good person.”

“So you’re better off the rest of us.” Ash shakes his head. “Look, it’s okay if you don’t want to tell me the rest.”

“No,” Charlie says. “No, I want to tell you.” She looks down at her hands. “Pamela already knows, but she doesn’t count. She snagged it out of my brain.”

“That’s what you get for dating a psychic.” Ash looks over at the memory of Charlie’s mom, who’s started a contest to see who can throw marshmallows into hot chocolate mugs. “Does Pamela think you’re a terrible person?”

“Pamela doesn’t count.”

“You’re a good person.”

“Ash,” Charlie says, pulling her head back to look at him. “I’m, like, basically a war criminal.”

“You’re not,” Ash says. “That was Dark Charlie.”

“That’s the thing, though.” Charlie’s looking at her family, at the marshmallow tossing, not Ash. The expression on her face says she doesn’t feel like she belongs with them. “It’s not like Dean, with the Mark. That twisted him into someone he wouldn’t have been. But me… I am Dark Charlie, Ash. I’m Dark Charlie just as much as I’m Light Charlie.”

“You’re not.”

“She’s part of me. I remember everything she did.”

Ash hugs Charlie again. “But she’s only part of you. You’re a good person.”

“I’m not,” Charlie says. “I don’t deserve to be in Heaven.”

She starts crying again. Ash holds her on her family couch while her parents and her grandparents celebrate Heaven Christmas in front of them and Charlie cries. 

“You’re not really Dark Charlie,” Ash says, running his hand over her hair. “If you were really Dark Charlie, they wouldn’t have had to split you in order to win the war.”

“But I agreed to it, Ash. Regular Charlie agreed to that. Me.”

“And you were doing what you thought you had to do.”

“Yeah, well.” Charlie sits up and wipes at her face with her hand. “Maybe I don’t think that should count for much.”

Ash hugs her again. “You’re wrong.”

* * *

Ash drops Charlie back at the memory of her apartment. He feels guilty leaving her, but Pamela’s coming over soon.

“I’ll be okay,” Charlie insists. “I’ve got endless Frappuccinos.”

“My _point_ ,” Ash says, because that toxic Starbucks crap is one of their running jokes. 

He hugs her goodbye, anyway.

He thinks about it over the next few days — running through his regular routine. Visit to Ellen and Jo. Visit to Bobby. It’s in the back of his mind as he hacks and drinks and gets into his regularly-scheduled bar fight. 

_Charlie shouldn’t be here_. 

Not because of anything she did in Oz. But because she had more shit to do back on Earth. Because she was still working through what they did to her in Oz. And because Ash doesn’t want to see her wear away to just her memories. 

He’s already working on the hack before he’s fully admitted to himself that he’s in it this time. It’s not like he hasn’t thought about it before — when Ellen and Jo popped up, for one. But so far, nobody’s _asked_ him to go back. (Nobody but Sam and Dean, but they’ve generally got their own rides scheduled whenever they pop up.)

He kept Chuck down on Earth, but that was special circumstances. Chuck never really made the transition to Heaven. 

It’s not even like Ash is sure he can do this.

* * *

Pamela picks it from his head before he even says it.

She and Charlie show up for a round of Let’s See If The Fireworks Charlie Ordered On Amazon Are The Real Deal, one of their regularly-scheduled Mythbusters-inspired projects. As soon as she’s through the door of Ash’s Roadhouse, she stops and stares at him.

“No, Ash,” she says. “It’s a terrible idea.”

Ash is so _in the zone_ with his Enochian generator that it takes him a moment to remember why he’s working on this. “It’s not a terrible idea,” he says, once his brain has caught up to what Pamela snagged out of it.

“It’s a terrible fucking idea.”

Charlie’s wandered over to the bar, where she’s spiking her Frappuccino with something that deserves a better fate, even in Heaven. “What are you even talking about?”

Pamela just glares at Ash, and Ash gives her a _look_ because she knows this is cheating. Against psychic-friend protocol. 

Charlie comes back from the bar. “Are you going to let me set off the fireworks from my apartment window this time?”

Pamela goes behind the bar to grab herself a beer. “He wants to kick you out of Heaven.”

“Shit, Charlie, no.” Ash glares at Pamela. “Way to put the worst possible spin on this.” He looks back at Charlie. “I want to give you the choice. If you want to.”

“The choice to get kicked out of Heaven?” Charlie’s confused, he can tell.

“The choice to be not-dead. To go back to Earth. Like Sam and Dean already did.”

Charlie sits down, hard, and lets her Frappuccino fall onto the table with a clunk. “Wait, is that something you can do?”

“He’s not sure,” Pamela says, keeping her eyes on Ash instead of Charlie. 

“You’re not helping,” Ash tells her. “Look, Charlie — I’m not sure. But maybe.”

“Like you did for Chuck that time.”

“Not exactly,” Ash admits. “It’s a little more complicated, getting the orders worked out. But I think I can do it. It’s not like the angels are expecting a hacker from inside Heaven.”

“The greatest firewall.” Charlie grins, and then takes a pull from her bottle. “Okay. What’s the price?”

“Price?”

“I know my narrative logic. You don’t get offered something like this without some kind of price.”

Ash takes a pull from his beer before he answers. “You won’t remember Heaven, for one.”

Charlie looks over at Pamela, who’s still glaring at Ash. “Is that it?”

“What he’s not telling you is that the angels may come down on him,” Pamela says. “And you’d be back on Earth.” She says it like she doesn’t understand why Charlie would consider eating at a third-tier fast food franchise that flunked last month’s health inspection. “You’re just going to die again. You’ve got a good thing here. Why would you leave?”

Charlie takes a deep breath, and then gets up to go put her arms around Pamela. “I’d miss you. So much. But it might still be the right thing.”

“You wouldn’t miss me at all,” Pamela says, pushing Charlie away.

“I would. I’m missing you already.”

“Charlie. This is not me trying to U-Haul you because I can’t hack it in Heaven without you,” Pamela says. “I’m fine if you want to leave _me_. Just — this is a bad idea, okay?”

Ash remembers Pamela on previous occasions when someone tried to leave Heaven, but he’s still — “Pamela? Are you picking up on anything we should know?”

“Like — from out there?” She reluctantly shakes her head. “No. But I still think it’s a shit idea.”

Charlie’s standing alone, looking overwhelmed and hopeful and like she’s not sure where she is. “Ash?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I think about this?”

* * *

Ash keeps hacking while Charlie thinks about it.

She goes to visit her mom — asks her what she thinks about this. From what Charlie tells Ash, she’s told her mom only the good parts of her trip to Oz before — “she always loved the adventures,” Charlie told him, “I couldn’t wreck that for her.”

Pamela disappears into the Meadowlands to sulk again, which is about what Ash expected, given that that’s what she’s done every time Sam and Dean break out of Heaven to head back downstairs again. 

Ash is triple-checking the mission parameters in his Enochian generator when Charlie comes back in. She’s got nothing with her, not even her usual laptop bag.   “So?” Ash asks, pushing back his chair and picking up his PBR.

“I’m still thinking about it.” Charlie shrugs, that one-shoulder shrug Ash has gotten used to seeing from her (and damn, is he going to miss her around here if she decides to go). “I mean. On the one hand. More adventures. But wanting an adventure is what got me into this mess in the first place.”

Charlie wants to see what Ash has hacked together, which he’s happy to show her — she’s the only person he’s met since his death who can understand even half of what he’s working on. (Actually, maybe one of the few people ever.) He shows her the parameters, the generator, the place where he sneaks the order into the Angel Radio Bands.

“And then they — what? Just bring me back?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, because you don’t have a body now.” Ash has thought about this in depth. He knows it’s possible — there’s precedent. But it’s harder. Charlie’s not going to wake up in a pine box like Dean did that time he went to the other place, because there’s no easy-target Charlie-DNA sitting around waiting for her down there, not if Ash knows Sam and Dean and their pyro tendencies when it comes to the bodies of their nearest and dearest. 

But he has a plan.

Charlie sticks around to look at the hack a bit longer. She’s especially interested in the memory parameters for some reason. 

“So you’re thinking about it?” Ash asks, again.

Charlie stares down at his computer screen, and then looks back up at him. “Yeah. I’m interested.”

* * *

What finally makes up Charlie’s mind is her mom.

“I kept asking her if she thought I should do it,” she tells Ash, a few days later. 

They’re back in her memory of Charlie’s apartment, maybe for the last time ever. She’ll be coming back to Heaven some day — Ash has no doubt of that. But her memories will shift, and her Heaven may be an entirely different one when she returns. 

“Yeah?” Ash asks.

“She kept telling me that it was my decision and she supported me no matter what,” Charlie said. “Which. Unhelpful, right? I mean I know I’d want my kid to be alive. I think? But then she’s my mom, and I — doesn’t she want me to stay with her? So.”

Ash nods. None of his family has bounced upstairs yet — they’re a long-lived clan, when they’re not caught up in pre-Apocalyptic fires. But he can imagine he’d feel the same. 

“But then I hung out with her for a while,” Charlie said. “In her Heaven. And she had this memory — of reading to me. Tucking me into bed. And she read me from The Hobbit, and she told little-me that life was short, so you had to cram in all the adventures you could.” She takes a deep breath. “So yeah. Life is short. I want back in.”

Ash feels himself grinning. “Right on.”

* * *

After that, it’s just another trip to pack for.

Charlie talks Ash into stripping everything he ordered on her memory of Amazon Prime back out of his computer. “Because we don’t know how this works,” she says, “and it’s not like we can test it, and what if it all disappears when I do? I don’t trust this narrative logic shit, dude.”

Yeah, well. Ash’s brain hurts at the thought of going back to the slow zone but he can’t deny that she has a point. So there’s that.

Then the hacking. And Charlie’s round of everyone, to say goodbye for now. 

Charlie disappears into Pamela’s memory of the Meadowlands for a few days, coming back with the memory of a sunburn and a blissed-out expression.

“She doesn’t want to come for the final experiment,” Charlie says, which is reasonable. Anyway, after they discuss, they decide that Charlie should be in her Heaven when Ash runs the code. No reason to risk having the angel show up at the Roadhouse and realize that Charlie’s in the wrong Heaven. Based on the angels Ash has seen so far, he’s guessing they won’t realize what his computer can do. But. No reason to risk it.

So it’s not even a grand goodbye party for Charlie. It’s a grind of checking and re-checking the parameters on the program (and Charlie insists on rewriting half the memory parameters herself). It’s a set of checklists and last-times. 

They watch one more thunderstorm from the apartment. Charlie opens the windows and leans out, over the city, and Ash stands behind her and smells the ozone, and tastes the rain.

* * *

The last time she’s in the Roadhouse, Charlie gives Ash a framed sketch of the symbol he uses to get into her Heaven.

“Because you’re not allowed to forget me, dude,” she says, hugging him hard.

As if that was possible. Ash hugs her back. “Yeah, well, don’t come back for a long time,” he says into her hair.

“You have to promise you’ll track me down,” Charlie insists. “When I come back.”

“Yeah,” Ash says. “I promise. And you have to promise to bring back all the new shit. I want to feel like an ancient geezer when I look at your memories next time.”

Charlie laughs. “I’ll bring back the bunker computer, that’ll really make you feel old!”

“That would be _radical_ ,” Ash says, because he knows it’s not what Charlie’s going for but the stories she’s told about the bunker make him lust after that system. So old. So complicated. So likely to be brought down by actual insect-type bugs.

The actual departure is — anticlimactic. Pamela shows up after all, to join Ash in the hugging and the goodbyes. And then Charlie turns around in the doorway.

“Hasta la vista, bitches.”

And she smiles. And then she’s gone.

Ash goes to the computer as soon as the door’s shut — better to do this now. He re-checks the parameters one last time (yet another one last time) and takes a deep breath and looks over at Pamela.

“It’s what she wants,” Pamela says. “I think she’s nuts. But you don’t need to worry that it’s not what she wants, I can tell you it is.”

That’s not what has Ash worried, not really, and Pamela must be upset about this whole thing to miss that. He’s worried about whether this is going to _work_. If he’s really able to hack an angel. If it’s even possible to raise a body that was burned. If Charlie’s going to end up as a restless soul back on the Earth. 

“Yeah,” Ash says. “Yeah, I know it’s what she wants.”

And he hits _run_. 

There are no Heavenly trumpets.

No thunder and lightning, no bright lights. No sucking tunnels to the Earth.

There’s nothing at all, in fact, and Pamela comes forward and puts her head on Ash’s shoulder.

“Did it run?”

“It ran,” Ash says. He breathes deep. He can’t hit run again, it’s an automatic red flag to the system. They can’t even check Charlie’s Heaven yet, because what if the angel is just getting around to it?

Pamela hangs with him, and they play pool and shoot the shit, talking about anything but Charlie until Ash’s Amazon Prime watch says a full day’s passed.

“You think it might be safe to check now,” Pamela says. She’s not asking, she pulled it out of Ash’s head.

“Yeah,” Ash says. He’s also wondering if the fact that Charlie’s watch is still on his wrist is a bad sign. But they agreed that Charlie would come back to them after twelve hours if no angels showed up. They’re well past the Charlie-pulls-the-ripcord point now.

Ash takes his chalk out of his pocket, and he scrawls the symbol on the door — the symbol for Charlie’s Heaven, a symbol he’s learned to draw almost as well as the symbol for his own.

And then he hits it.

And nothing happens.

“So — what?” Pamela comes over, tries hitting the symbol herself. “It’s not there?”

“It’s not there,” Ash says. _Yeah._ Yeah, that happened.

Charlie’s gone. And in his heart, Ash knows where she is — back on Earth. Back in her body. 

Having adventures.

Ash chooses to have faith.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading this Jossed-by-canon-before-it-got-finished fic! :D 
> 
> If you're curious about what happened next to Charlie, that's what the first fic in this serious is about.


End file.
